The MySQL 5.0 Archive Storage Engine

More than at any other time, database professionals are being aggressively challenged by mushrooming volumes of data in corporate business systems. While some industry analysts project data growth at an average rate of 42% a year, that figure is conservative in some installations where growth rates are several hundred percent, with no end in sight.

What's to blame for sky-rocketing data volumes? First, corporations have realized the golden nugget potential of all the data floating around in their transactional systems and are utilizing data warehousing more than ever before. The strategic use of data is high on the mind of nearly every CIO and business executive, so in response, transactional data is stockpiled into data warehouses where business intelligence users constantly aim their analytic queries to produce forecasts that are used to make key business decisions.